Posture Pal with Walabot

Prevent neck and back pain by monitoring your sitting posture with Walabot’s distance sensor and an Android app.

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Walabot

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

Posture Pal usage and components overview

Walabot with Raspberry Pi

Why I built Posture Pal

Millions of people spend 7-8 hours a day sitting in front of their computers. One common trait is apparent among people with improper computer usage: a head-forward posture. Since people usually sit while using a computer, people also tend to slouch and bend their spine into a curve as well [1]. Neck pain caused by improper computer usage can be prevented through mindfulness training without the need for uncomfortable equipment.

This head forward posture has been shown to exert considerable pressure on the human neck. A normal human head weighs around 10 to 12 pounds (4.54 kg). An assessment of stresses found that a 15 degrees head forward posture increased the effective weight on the neck portion of the spine to 27 pounds (12.25 kg). According to one study, work-related neck pain is twice as likely for those sitting with 20 degree neck flexion. I built this app to help remind me when my head is too close to the computer and to improve the overall quality of my coding lifestyle. The current stage consists of an open source Android application developed by the author which provides notifications when the user is too close to the computer.

Step 1: Start the server on the Pi

Install Walabot SDK.

We will use the Python library Flask to serve the Walabot target distance, so on your Raspberry Pi